The Welfare Experiences project is an ambitious, innovative project comparing the experience of receiving benefits in five different countries: Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Spain and the UK.

The project will be one of the first international comparisons of the experiences of individuals receiving public benefits.  We are looking at the nature of these experiences, how different policies affect them, and their impacts – with the aim of making welfare systems work better (see ‘Goals’ below).

The project runs from 2023-28 and is both mixed-methods and coproduced – find out more by looking at the Work Packages page, which explains what we are doing.

Our pan-European team includes eight different research organisations and seven organisations that work with people with lived experience of claiming – you can find out more about the Team here.

The WelfareExperiences project receives €3m of funding from the UK Research & Innovation Guarantee [EP/Y024621/1], having been selected by the European Research Council.

Our goals: a joint WelfareExperiences statement.

We have come together in this project to pursue two shared goals.

First, welfare policymaking needs to work in partnership with people receiving benefits, who are experts in their own right. Too often, researchers and policymakers ignore the views of claimants when proposing welfare policies – leading to policies that do not just fail on their own terms, but which also make claimants’ lives worse. To be clear: claimants themselves do not know everything, and obviously the democratic process means that elected politicians need to take a leading role. But effective, just policy requires claimants to be part of the conversation about how things should change – excluding claimants is unfair, and ignores some of the greatest experts about how benefits systems work.

Secondly, welfare policymaking too often focuses only on financial incentives, and ignores the other things that matter. To date, most research has looked at whether welfare systems reduce poverty and encourage people to work. These are obviously important, but from speaking to claimants, we know that other things matter too – whether benefits provide dignity, security and feel fair; or whether people feel stigmatised, insecure, and unjustly treated. These matter in themselves – and they also affect other things, ranging from people’s mental health to their decisions about work.

• We need to change the way people think about ‘welfare’ – it is not just a financial transfer, but a complex interaction between the citizen and the state, and the way that this interaction takes place can have far-reaching effects.
• We want to make these ‘claimant experiences’ visible, and to start building an evidence base around them so that we better understand how welfare systems really work. But the changes we need are bigger than our project alone can achieve – our hope is that others will join us, until eventually we change ways of thinking, and ultimately create better experiences for claimants.